Krister Henriksson: why I'm leaving Wallander | Television & radio | The Guardian Crime drama Krister Henriksson: why I'm leaving Wallander In his only British press interview, the Swedish star talks to Vicky Frost about life beyond the maverick TV detective Krister Henriksson has played the ruffled Swedish detective for almost a decade. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian Crime drama Krister Henriksson: why I'm leaving Wallander In his only British press interview, the Swedish star talks to Vicky Frost about life beyond the maverick TV detective Friday 20 June 2014 14.09 EDT First published on Friday 20 June 2014 14.09 EDT Share on Messenger Close Krister Henriksson is considering what he will miss most about playing Kurt Wallander, the detective he has brought to life on screen over almost a decade. It is not the policeman's sense of social justice. Nor the beauty of the Skåne landscape. Instead, it is the fights with the company who made the films. "They thought I was a big ass, and I was.

And I thought they were big asses, and I can tell you they were big asses." It's the kind of belligerent response one might expect from Henning Mankell's detective, though Henriksson delivers his explanation with more of a playful grin than Wallander might. Saturday marks the actor's final outing as Wallander for BBC4 audiences, but for a man who professes to be happy to have left the rumpled detective behind – "It is sometimes good to press the delete button" – Henriksson seems committed to him to the end. He delights in discussing the clashes, his refusal to say certain lines, the scripts he thought needed more work. These conflicts remain an essential part of the way Henriksson, 67, also an acclaimed stage actor, works. They are what he enjoys about his job, he says, laughing. "I always have fights with my directors about their ideas, because – I won't say my ideas are better, but I think they are good enough." That tension spurred him on during 14-hour days of filming Wallander in the pretty village of Ystad on the Swedish coast. "To endure it, you have to be angry all the time.

In a way, you have to be aggressive to stand it." There is clearly tension between the actor's desire to try new things, and the acclaim Wallander has brought Henriksson, in Sweden and internationally. The Swedish TV series features new mysteries, created with Mankell, so it is not bound by the number of books that exist. But the actor was determined this would be his last outing as the detective. "Even if they should try to convince me to do some more, I'd really decided. This is it. This is the end." The plots now give him no way back: in this final series of six films – he has made more than 30 – Wallander has been struggling with early-onset Alzheimer's. That's perhaps made it easier to leave him behind, reflects Henriksson. "You have a communication with a part … And as Kurt got Alzheimer's, the communication stopped in a way. I thought: 'We don't have anything more to say to each other,' because it would be too complicated. So in a way I was relieved." He had made his peace with the detective in advance of filming. "Before I started shooting I said goodbye to Kurt," he says.

"And I had made this decision and as an actor you can't be too sentimental." It is not as if Henriksson had spent his whole career pining to be Wallander. In fact, he initially declined the role. The production company kept asking. Henriksson kept turning them down. "Suddenly I realised when I said no, the salary increased. So I kept saying no," he laughs. Then Mankell called the actor and the pair went for a walk in Stockholm. The author asked Henriksson to at least read the books. "And when I read them I thought: 'Why haven't they asked me to do this part before?' Because it was very much like me." The pair share a tendency for crumpled – although on Henriksson, wearing an expensive-looking jacket accessorised with jewellery and sunglasses, the result is more stylish than dishevelled – but there are other similarities too. Mankell, Henriksson and Wallander are of the same generation in Sweden. "Wherever you came from you had the chance to education, however rich your parents were. It was a very leftwing time in Stockholm, so even if your family hadn't the money, you could get the education.

We all had an access to the future in a way," the actor says. That shared past shapes their attitudes towards questions to which Mankell repeatedly returns: immigration, inequality, the breakdown of community. But if Henriksson feels an affinity with the role, so too, one imagines, do other actors who have brought Kurt Wallander to screen – Rolf Lassgård played him in films adapted from the books, while the latest set of BBC Wallander films, starring Kenneth Branagh as the detective, are due next year. When the Branagh series was announced, "I thought, well, we'd better pack up and go home now the BBC is coming," Henriksson says. "I was brought up with BBC productions, and the BBC is really cradle of the crimes for [Swedes] … we all had an inferiority complex to the British in a way." In fact, all three actors' portrayals are admired, with "best Wallander" debates prompting sometimes furious and passionate debate. Henriksson comes out of those discussions pretty well. He says he often wishes he could explain why British viewers have fallen so hard for his portrayal. " Has he been tempted to watch the other Wallanders?

While in the role he wanted to avoid being influenced in the wrong way by their performances. "You have to make up which Wallander you are," he says. And now? "Now that I've stopped shooting it's something like: 'No that was a period in my life. It's over, and I'm not interested any more.'" He has another TV project – not a crime drama – with Mankell in the pipeline, while his next projects will be on stage. But he is not interested in roles he is perhaps expected to take. While in London he saw Simon Russell Beale as King Lear at the National Theatre. "An astonishing actor, but I also thought, God, what a dull part. Because it's a part like Kurt Wallander: confused. I think Lear is an Alzheimer's person too, and I don't want to do that in blank verse." Instead he has plans for the anarchistic Karlsson, the star of three books for children by Pippi Longstocking author Astrid Lindgren. He is determined both to have fun and not to be a coward on stage, which is why, he says, he decided on a show for kids – unlike adults they are never polite about a performance.

But prod a little, and it seems there is a little more to his decision. "I think why I'm doing it is, there's something in my life – I've been working so much, a lot, really hard working, there's a lot I missed. And I divorced when I was younger," he says. "I have led a Wallander life and so I haven't spent that much time with children, not as much as I wanted to, and not even with my grandchildren. So this is a gift to them." The final episode of Wallander airs on Saturday on BBC4 at 9pm. The DVD box set is released on 23 June by Arrow Films' Nordic Noir label Krister Henriksson, interview: from Wallander to the West End - Telegraph Theatre Features Krister Henriksson, interview: from Wallander to the West End Krister Henriksson, star of the Swedish Wallander series, tells Jane Shilling about killing off the famous detective and making his British debut. Krister Henriksson says he 'recognised his life’ in Henning Mankell’s Wallander novels.

By Jane Shilling 12:02PM BST 12 Sep 2012 Each evening in the seaside town of Ystad in south-eastern Sweden, a watchman in brass-buttoned livery blows a funnel-shaped horn from the tower of St Maria’s church, on the quarter-hour from 9.15pm until 1am. It is a melancholy sound, like the bellowing of a cow after a lost calf, but then Ystad – at least in its fictional incarnation as the setting for the Swedish and English television adaptations of Henning Mankell’s Wallander novels — is a melancholy place, full of untimely death and human wickedness. In reality it is a pretty medieval town with cobbled streets, a couple of handsome Gothic churches and a tourist office offering Wallander apps for your smartphone and a Wallander film walk. But to stroll through Ystad on a summer evening with Krister Henriksson, star of the Swedish Wallander, is a strange experience.

As he ambles, an elegantly crumpled figure in a cream linen jacket, towards the restaurant where he often eats after filming, there is a silent ripple of turning heads as walkers do double-takes and cyclists wobble off their bikes. At the restaurant, a man too shy to request an autograph sends the waitress to plead on his behalf. An English teenager at the next table comes over to ask if she can be photographed with Henriksson, who amiably abandons his supper while her father takes the shot. The attention is courteous, but relentless. No wonder he has said that the series he is currently filming will be his last. From the beginning, Krister Henriksson’s relationship with Henning Mankell’s philosophical detective was ambivalent. When he was originally asked to do the first series, which aired in 2005, he refused and kept saying no until Mankell called in person to persuade him. Related Articles Wallander: Original Films 1-6, DVD review 12 Jun 2012 Henriksson had never read the Wallander novels.

“So he sent me the books, and when I read them, I thought, 'Why haven’t they asked me before?’ I recognised my life.” Mankell and Henriksson are near-contemporaries, born in 1948 and 1946 respectively, “and I think [the Wallander novels] are very much about a man who was born at that time”. Like Wallander, Henriksson says that devotion to his work cost him his first marriage. And like his fictional alter ego, who longed to be an opera impresario, he flirted with an alternative profession, medicine. Henriksson grew up in the coastal village of Grisslehamn, where his father was a fisherman. In the summer, tourists from Stockholm would visit: “They were highly educated, spoke a different language from our dialect, had a different way of doing things. They made you lose confidence in yourself. But on the other hand, they made you long for something else. They talked about books. There were no books in my home.” Education was his escape route from Grisslehamn. He began studying to be a doctor, but a first encounter with the theatre while doing military service changed his mind.

He auditioned for drama school and by 27 was playing the lead in Ibsen’s Peer Gynt at the Stockholm City Theatre. But he was struck with stage fright so incapacitating that he fainted on stage. A doctor in the audience treated him, “And it was strange, but I was rather glad it had happened. I had had the opportunity to try acting, but this meant that I should become a doctor. So I decided to go back [to medical school].” While waiting to resume his studies, he worked in a hospital, where one of his patients was a businessman suffering from terminal cancer. “For half a year, I sat and talked to him. One day he said, 'Krister, I’m going to die soon, so I’ll say goodbye. But I’ll tell you something. I like your stories. I feel there’s an actor in you. Give it another try.’ “So I called my agent, and said, 'Get me a little part. Just a few lines.’ He got me a few lines in a Chekhov play.

And I liked saying those few lines, so I said, 'Can I have more lines?’ ” It was while filming the first series of Wallander that he came up with the project that will bring him to the West End next spring, a one-man stage adaptation of Hjalmar Söderberg’s haunting 1905 philosophical novel, Doktor Glas, which tells the story of an angst-ridden fin-de-siècle physician who falls tragically in love with one of his patients. The novel, a beloved classic in Sweden, has just been reissued in an elegant English translation with an introduction by Margaret Atwood. “It’s very easy, when you’re filming, to end up in the bar, so I thought I had to find something else to do in the evenings. I’m not interested in crosswords or knitting. So what could I do? “Then I remembered that there was a very famous actor called Allan Edwall , who was my idol. He did a monologue based on Doktor Glas. When I was 35 and he was the age I am now, I saw the play and went to see him afterwards.

As I was leaving, he said, 'Krister, I think you will do that part some day in the future.’ “So I thought, 'Well, now I have something to do in the evenings.’ It is such a beautiful text, and I planned to do five performances. My friends said, 'That many?’ ” But the reviews glittered with superlatives and the play was a hit. He took it on tour, then transferred to the National Theatre in Stockholm. An English actress, Victoria Jeffrey, saw the show and became convinced that it would do well in London, where it opens next April, in Swedish with surtitles. “It’s a fantastic thing, for a Scandinavian actor to be playing in the West End,” says Henriksson. “However it turns out, the fact they’ve invited me is a huge success.” Now his relationship with Wallander is almost at an end: “I said to Henning, 'You must save my life. You have to do something with Kurt Wallander so that we can’t shoot any more. So he wrote that final book, The Troubled Man, and he gave Wallander Alzheimer’s.

But it has been a wonderful role, and I’ll miss him.” As for life after Wallander: “I’m 65. I’ve done my career and it’s time for me to do other things that challenge me. I’ve thought of doing stand-up comedy, telling everything about my life. To be brave on stage. I love the idea.” 'Doktor Glas’ runs at the Wyndhams Theatre from April 16 to May 11, 2013. Priority booking for Telegraph readers opens tomorrow until September 16. For tickets call 0844 871 2118 or visit Wallander (TV Series 2005–2013) - IMDb IMDb There was an error trying to load your rating for this title. Some parts of this page won't work property. Please reload or try later. X Beta I'm Watching This! Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends. Error A Swedish cop in a small town near the Baltic coast. Creator: Kurt and his men tries to find the connection between a horrible murder taken place in Ystad and the kidnapping of one in the police force daughter. It also seems someone has infiltrated the police ...

7.0 Eleven-year-old Johannes is found dead in a barn after he has been sexually abused. Lindman is charged with telling the father, whom he knows from a local shooting club, but is taken off the case for... 6.8 A girl disappears on her way to school, and suspicion falls on her father who has been fighting for her custody. Wallander's investigation is helped when he visits a woman whom he had arrested when ... 6.5 a list of 25 titles created 23 Sep 2013 a list of 30 titles created 18 May 2014 a list of 34 titles created 14 Jan 2015 a list of 48 titles created 22 Apr 2015 a list of 47 titles created 1 month ago Search for " Wallander " on Amazon.com Connect with IMDb Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Use the HTML below. You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. A TV program centered on a soul-searching Swedish cop.

Stars: Kenneth Branagh, Richard McCabe, Jeany Spark Commissioner Martin Beck and his eccentric partner Gunvald Larsson investigate murders in the flawed social structure of Stockholm, Sweden. Stars: Peter Haber, Ingvar Hirdwall, Mikael Persbrandt Shortly after police discovers the murder of three friends, police inspector Wallander finds his friend and colleague Svedberg dead. At first believing that Svedberg killed himself, ... See full summary » Director: Birger Larsen A noir crime drama set in Aberystwyth, Wales, where troubled DCI Tom Mathias solves murders while searching for redemption. Stars: Richard Harrington, Mali Harries, Alex Harries A light plane crashes outside of Mossby strand, and a detonated armour-piercing shell is found in the wreckage. Kurt Wallander is called in to investigate. A few days later, two elderly ... See full summary » Director: Daniel Lind Lagerlöf The plot revolves around an attempt to disable all the financial systems in the Western world by idealists who believe that it will change the world and correct its imbalances, notably the poverty in Africa.

Stars: Rolf Lassgård, Marie Richardson, Lars Melin In this adaption of a Henning Mankell novel, Inspector Kurt Wallander investigates a case of murder and trade of human organs. Stars: Rolf Lassgård, Marie Richardson, Christer Fant Police detective Sarah Lund investigates difficult cases with personal and political consequences. Stars: Sofie Gråbøl, Morten Suurballe, Lars Mikkelsen With her caustic wit and singular charm, DCI Vera Stanhope and her trusted right-hand man DS Joe Ashworth face a series of captivating murder mysteries set against the breathtaking Northumberland landscape. Stars: Brenda Blethyn, Jon Morrison, David Leon Inspector Morse has an ear for music, a taste for beer and a nose for crime. He sets out with Sergeant Lewis to solve each intriguing case. Stars: John Thaw, Kevin Whately, James Grout Inspector Robert Lewis and Sergeant James Hathaway solve the tough cases that the learned inhabitants of Oxford throw at them.

Stars: Kevin Whately, Laurence Fox, Clare Holman Inspector George Gently (TV Series 2007) Crime | Drama | Mystery With the help of DS John Bacchus, Inspector George Gently spends his days bringing to justice members of the criminal underworld who are unfortunate enough to have the intrepid investigator assigned to their cases. Stars: Martin Shaw, Lee Ingleby, Simon Hubbard 5 November 2007 (Finland) See more » Also Known As: $774 (USA) (15 June 2012) Gross: Did You Know? Trivia In Sweden, from where "Wallander" originates, it's not really known as a TV series but a straight to video movie series, with some key episodes premiered in theaters. Only later, usually 1-2 years, are the episodes shown on TV. This is a common release cycle for Swedish crime series. See more » Connections User Reviews You can forget the Americans and the British, it's the Swede's who really know how to do it 2 January 2010 | by gtbarker – See all my reviews The original Wallander series is a complete triumph.

As others here I caught it on the off chance on BBC4 and full expected to be left a little cold by it. But I can't tell you how happy I am to tell you I couldn't have been more wrong. The first thing that grabbed me was the complete lack of silly old hat jerky camera that was always naff anyway (and which the British for some reason still persist with). Then I began to notice other things, very little shouting, no dumb music played over the dialogue. By now I was starting to sit up as it dawned on me I was watching a very rare thing these days: intelligent drama written for grown ups and blatantly not pandering to the fickleness of the under-25s. Once this realisation had dawned the real strength of this series suddenly grabbed me: the characterisation. First of all it was the wonderful portrayal of the passionate, but lost and vulnerable Linda Wallander by the beautiful and much lamented Johanna Sällström. Then it was Kurt himself and his flimsy grip on reality and finally and sadly not until the final brilliant episode that I got to grips with the hot head character of Stefan.

Dysfunctional, deeply flawed and very human characters brilliantly written and superbly executed to breathtaking effect by the excellent cast. I honestly cannot think of a TV series that could be beat this. Can we please have some TV for grown ups again made in Britain? No? I didn't think so. 54 of 61 people found this review helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes The Detective Kurt Wallander on DVD - The New York Times The New York Times Television |With a Job Like His, You’d Brood Too Search Photo Foreground, Krister Henriksson as a detective in the film “Wallander: The Revenge.” Credit Music Box Films FOURTEEN years before Lisbeth Salander tortured her legal guardian, and 16 years before Sarah Lund began badgering her superiors in the Copenhagen police department, Kurt Wallander ran over a rabbit. “It struck the left front wheel with a soft thud,” Henning Mankell wrote in “Faceless Killers,” the 1991 novel that introduced Wallander, a police detective in the windswept precincts of southernmost Sweden. “He didn’t stop to check whether the hare was still alive.” “What’s wrong with me?

he thought.” Over the course of 10 novels and various novellas and stories, Mr. Mankell sketched out what was wrong with Wallander — misanthropy, despair, thoughtlessness, bad eating habits — and created the prototype of the brooding detective that has become the most popular Scandinavian import in the English-speaking world since Ikea. Relatively recent arrivals like Salander, the heroine of Stieg Larsson’s massively popular Millennium novels and their Swedish and American film adaptations, and Lund, protagonist of the hit Danish television series “Forbrydelsen” (remade in America as “The Killing”), have eclipsed Mr. Mankell’s dyspeptic detective in British and American popular culture, in part because of their on-screen success. Advertisement Continue reading the main story But Wallander actually has the largest cinematic résumé of any of these Nordic snoops: he’s the central character in more than 40 feature-length works made over the last two decades, mostly for television.

Many of them are available in the United States on DVD or streaming video; a new batch arrives on Tuesday with the release of the DVD set “Henning Mankell’s Wallander” (Music Box, 7 discs, $74.95). Continue reading the main story The top cop of Ystad, an actual town in rural Skane County, Sweden, Wallander is best known to American audiences in the intense, compact form of Kenneth Branagh, who plays him in the BBC and PBS series “Wallander.” (A third three-episode season of that series begins Sept. 9 on “Masterpiece Mystery!”) Photo Kenneth Branagh, who plays the character in the BBC series “Wallander.” Credit Left Bank Pictures/Yellow Bird for Masterpiece His most longstanding interpreter, however, is the Swedish actor Krister Henriksson, whose more phlegmatic, workaday version of the detective has figured in 26 episodes of a Swedish TV series also called “Wallander.” It’s the second season of that show, which began in 2009, that is now being released on DVD here.

(One of the episodes, “Henning Mankell’s Wallander: The Revenge,” is also being released in theaters in New York and Los Angeles on Friday.) And completists will want to note that there is a third Wallander, Rolf Lassgard, who played the character in nine Swedish theatrical films released from 1994 to 2007 (overlapping slightly with the Swedish TV series). Some of these can be found on DVD, and one, “One Step Behind,” is available from Amazon Instant Video. The new DVD set allows for a comparison of the Wallanders of Mr. Branagh and Mr. Henriksson — not fire and ice, exactly, but more along the lines of cheap vodka and iced coffee. The British series has taken Mr. Mankell’s irritable character and pushed him to new depths of dour angst and desperation. In Season 2 of the Swedish series, by comparison, Mr. Henriksson’s Wallander is a crotchety but not entirely unhappy burgher, newly ensconced in a tidy house with a view of the sea. Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter.

You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up Privacy Policy Some of this difference may be traceable to the show’s sources. The nine episodes of the BBC “Wallander” have been direct adaptations of the Mankell novels. The bulk of the Swedish series, including all the episodes of the second season, consists of original stories scripted by a variety of Swedish writers. “The Revenge” is the work of Hans Rosenfeldt, lead writer on another highly regarded Scandinavian crime series, “The Bridge.” Having moved away from the books, the writers and producers have not only softened some of Wallander’s rough edges but also toned down the grisliness of the novels, with their battered elderly farmers and self-immolating teenage girls. There’s also less of a sense of the “ponderous philosophizing” (in the words Marilyn Stasio, a crime-fiction critic for The New York Times Book Review) that can mar Mr. Mankell’s writing. Fans of the original might find Mr. Henriksson’s Wallander on the mild side compared with Mr. Branagh’s twitchy head case, which plays to the aspects of the character that have been most influential in the overall Scandinavian crime boom.

But the Swedish series captures another important side of Wallander — the harried middle manager, contemptuous of a new generation’s poor work ethic — that’s largely ignored by the psychology-heavy British show. In this regard, the BBC-PBS “Wallander” displays a tendency shared by AMC’s “Killing”: an emphasis on what might be considered stereotypically “Scandinavian” attributes like starkness, silence, darkness and angst that goes far beyond the actual Scandinavian productions. The Swedish “Wallander” is marked most strongly by its resemblance to an earlier generation of well-made, comfortably formulaic British detective shows like “Inspector Morse.” Perhaps that’s not surprising, since Mr. Mankell has cited Arthur Conan Doyle and John Le Carré among his own influences. The biggest departure in the early episodes of the new DVD set — and one that’s likely to be controversial with fans of Mr. Mankell’s gloomy original character — is the introduction of a potential love interest, an apparently normal and wholesome prosecutor played by Lena Endre. (Ms.

Endre also appears in the Swedish adaptations of the Millennium novels, as the publisher Erika Berger.) Only the Swedes could provide the most un-Scandinavian twist of all: a happy Kurt Wallander. Correction: June 10, 2012 An article on May 27 about the police detective Kurt Wallander, a character in novels and television shows, misstated the date the BBC and PBS series “Wallander” will begin its third season on “Masterpiece Mystery!” After the section had gone to press, the date was changed to Sept. 9, from July 1. A version of this article appears in print on May 27, 2012, on Page AR15 of the New York edition with the headline: With a Job Like His, You’d Brood Too. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe Wallander | Henning Mankell Others Wallander The Swedish movies portraying inspector Kurt Wallander have been filmed at various occasions. Wallander has been portrayed by Krister Henriksson, Rolf Lassgård and Gustaf Skarsgård (The Pyramide).

Rolf Lassgård played Wallander in the first adapted screen plays and participated in a total of nine Wallander films between 1994 and 2007. Krister Henriksson might be the Swedish actor who knows Wallander most intimately. Henriksson has played the title role as the grumpy but upright detective in approximately thirty films, several of them specially authored by Mankell and adapted straight for the screen. In 2013, Krister Henriksson is again the man of the moment as Wallander in The Troubled Man, one out of six new Wallander movies currently produced by the production company Yellow Bird. The Swedish Wallander films have also been broadcasted in England on BBC 4 and in the US where all were well received by the English speaking audience. When the Wallander movie The Revenge premiered in the US in the spring of 2012 it received the review ”one of this year’s best and most provocative thrillers” by film critic Roger Ebert.

Krister Henriksson on the 'risky' challenge of Doktor Glas - BBC News BBC News Krister Henriksson on the 'risky' challenge of Doktor Glas By Tim Masters Entertainment and arts correspondent, BBC News 18 April 2013 Swedish-language play hits West End Krister Henriksson is best known on TV as Wallander. As he makes his West End debut in Doktor Glas, he ponders how a play in Swedish will fare in London - and explains why he's happy to say goodbye to Henning Mankell's famous detective. "Maybe this is silly to do but at least it's brave," says Krister Henriksson, settling on to a sofa in his dressing-room at Wyndham's Theatre. "I've had a long career as an actor in Sweden and this is the right point for me to do something very risky and challenging." On the face of it, Doktor Glas - a one-man show in Swedish (with English surtitles) - does seem a risky piece of programming for a West End packed with musicals and plays with A-list British casts. I read it 70 times and finally I knew it by heart.

Krister Henriksson on reading the novel Doktor Glas Doktor Glas is adapted from the 1905 novel by Hjalmar Soderberg. The book is on the school curriculum in Sweden, but not widely known in the UK. It tells the story of a 19th century physician who falls madly in love with a patient - the unhappily married wife of a clergyman. The book made an impact on Henriksson when he studied it as a teenager. "It's a crime story but at the same time it asks philosophical and existential questions." It was while he was filming the first Wallander series in 2005 that he returned to Doktor Glas with the idea of staging the play himself. "In Sweden we have something we call 'hotel death'," he explains. "If you live too long at a hotel you will die! I was growing fatter and going to the bar - so I thought I must rescue myself and find something meaningful to do in my free time. "Then I remembered seeing the play Doktor Glas many years ago starring my idol [Allan Edwall].

I'd gone backstage to say hello and he said to me 'Krister, some day I think you will do this part.' Image caption Doktor Glas is the story of a doctor who falls madly in love with an unhappily married patient "So 25 years later I remembered that meeting and I sat in the evening and read Doktor Glas. During one year, I read it 70 times and finally I knew it by heart. "The rest," he admits, "is a fairytale." Henriksson performed the play in Stockholm where it became a sell-out success. He has been playing Doktor Glas on and off over six years across Scandinavia between other TV and theatre work. "As an actor, I'm rather restless," he says. "After 40 performances I start to feel fed up, but never with this play." Now British producer Martin Witts has brought Doktor Glas to London in the hope that it will tap into the British passion for Scandinavian culture. The success of Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy - beginning with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - opened the door to other "Scandi crime" hits such as Danish TV series The Killing and Norwegian film Headhunters, based on the novel by Jo Nesbo.

The Swedish TV series Wallander, adapted from Henning Mankell's books about the world-weary detective, spawned a British remake starring Sir Kenneth Branagh. Henriksson was initially keen to perform Doktor Glas in London in English and took lessons to improve his accent. But he realised the play worked best in his native tongue. "You become deaf to the beauty of your own language because you speak it all the time.

It's like Shakespeare - you can translate it but you lose the poetry." KRISTER HENRIKSSON Born 12 November 1946 Originally studied to be a doctor, but changed his mind during a brush with theatre during military service Breakthrough role was Peer Gynt at the Stockholm City Theatre, aged 27 Henriksson has played a string of major roles on stages around the world, including working alongside Ingmar Bergman when he directed him in A Winter's Tale at the Royal Dramatic Theatre (Kungliga Dramatiska Teatern) Bergman chose Henriksson for the role as the young Bergman in Liv Ullman's film Faithless (Trolosa) Henriksson studied stand-up comedy for a year to improve his stagecraft What type of audience does he think Doktor Glas will draw in London? "I hope that a British audience will come. Not the Swedish tourists in London - they can see me in Stockholm!" Having shot a third and final series of Wallander, Henriksson seems happy to leave the character behind him. "When they first asked me to do this part I said 'no, no, no' and then I noticed every time I said 'no' the salary went up," he laughs.

The actor went on saying no until Mankell called him personally and they met in Stockholm. "I'd not even read the books, so Henning sent them to me and I read them in a weekend. I thought it was the ideal part for me, so I said yes. "I did the first series, I couldn't say I was quite satisfied. There were many ups and downs. They asked me to do another 13 episodes and I did them on the condition I was much more involved in the script. After that they wanted me to do another 13 - and I said I wanted to do something else in my life." In the end he agreed with Mankell to make a final six stories, which began shooting last year. Image caption Krister Henriksson (left) as Wallander with Douglas Johansson as Martinsson With a laugh, Henriksson admits he now regrets not making a couple more episodes - in order to beat the record of a famous fictional British detective. "We did 32 Wallanders and then I googled Inspector Morse and they did 33! If we could have done two more we would have won!" He adds: "Wallander has been a fantastic thing to do.

But I'm not young any longer and it's a tough schedule and it takes me away from my family. "I'm so glad I did it. I wouldn't have been invited to London if I hadn't done the Wallander series. I'm convinced of that." Doktor Glas is performed in its original Swedish with English surtitles at Wyndham's Theatre, London, until 11 May 2013. Kurt Wallander - Mankells Wallander (SE) Characters - ShareTV Season 1 / Episode 4: - The Darkness / The Overdose Kurt Wallander: [to child prostitute pimp] A while back this young fellow was sitting in the chair you're in now. He had read the lists of those who had died in the tsunami in Asia. He got hold of the address of one of the families affected. Know what he did? He broke into the house and stole anything of any value. But before he left, guess what he did? He turned all the taps on full blast all over the house. When I saw him sitting across from me, I thought... "this is the most despicable and pathetic person I have ever met." Only now I know better.

Wallander's Krister Henriksson: 'I'd like to play King Lear' | Stage | The Guardian Theatre Wallander's Krister Henriksson: 'I'd like to play King Lear' When Wallander actor Krister Henriksson memorised a downbeat Swedish novel, he didn't expect his efforts to produce a theatre smash hit. He tells Laura Barnett about playing the West End, his Shakespeare ambitions – and Scandi-mania 'Hollywood could do Doktor Glas with Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt' … Krister Henriksson. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian Sunday 7 April 2013 12.59 EDT First published on Sunday 7 April 2013 12.59 EDT Share on Messenger Close Eight years ago, actor Krister Henriksson was living in a hotel in the Swedish fishing village of Ystad, filming Wallander , when he came up with a novel way of spending the evenings. Not for him a nightly trip to the hotel bar or gorging on room service. Instead, he decided to dedicate his free time to memorising Doktor Glas, an experimental 1905 novel by the Swedish writer Hjalmar Söderberg.

"If you're living in a hotel for one and a half years," Henriksson tells me in his near-fluent, gruffly accented English, "you grow fatter. In Sweden, we call it 'the hotel death'. I got scared – I thought: 'I have to save my life. I have to do something.' I'm no good at knitting, I'm not interested in doing crosswords. Suddenly, I thought of Doktor Glas. And I sat every night and read that book, over and over, until I finally knew it by heart." Doktor Glas is a haunting thriller, made up of the vivid diary entries of a lonely, virginal doctor who falls madly in love with an unhappily married patient, and decides to take matters into his own hands. Touching on infidelity, abortion and euthanasia, it feels thrillingly ahead of its time – and is a classic in Sweden, where it's taught in schools.

Most English-speaking readers have probably never heard of it, but that could be about to change: the book was recently reissued in a lucid English translation , with a foreword by Margaret Atwood (she calls it "one of those marvellous books that appears as fresh and vivid now as on the day it was published"). Henriksson studied the novel in school, and was drawn to the compelling love triangle at its heart. "It's about crime, passion – a woman and two men and cyanide," he says. "I'm very surprised that Hollywood hasn't bought the rights. They could do it with Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt." He smiles impishly. "I would be the producer." Another Swedish actor, Allan Edwall , gave Henriksson the idea of performing the novel on stage. Edwall first adapted Doktor Glas as a monologue in the 1960s; Henriksson saw his show, and found it inspiring. "I went backstage and thanked him," Henriksson says.

"And when I was just about to walk away, he said to me, 'Krister, some day I think you should do that part.' I thought nothing of it at the time – and then, 30 years later, suddenly I knew what he meant." Henriksson's take on Doktor Glas , which uses Edwall's 1960s script, has been a huge hit in Stockholm, playing to sold-out houses at the Vasateatern and Dramaten theatres , where Ingmar Bergman once presided. (Henriksson, like most successful Swedish actors, worked with Bergman several times; he also played the young director in Liv Ullmann's 2000 film, Faithless .) The production has also toured Scandinavia, and is now coming to London's West End – which is where, in an empty theatre, I'm talking to Henriksson, who seems quite unable to believe he's really here. "I was surprised to be asked," he says. "I am still surprised. Sometimes I wake up at night, and think, 'Maybe I am in shock – I don't understand it.' It's unusual for the West End to have a production like this.

It's not a farce, it's not Noël Coward. It's a Swedish actor, speaking Swedish [the show will have surtitles]. I don't think any Scandinavian actor has done a monologue like this here before." He appears to be right on this. Several major Swedish productions have toured to Britain before – most notably, Bergman's acclaimed versions of Hamlet and Ibsen's The Wild Duck . But none was a one-man show based on an experimental novel. With Britain's commercial theatres still dominated by box office-friendly musicals (eight million people saw a musical in the West End last year, according to the Society of London Theatres, almost twice those who saw a play), it's a pretty risky piece of programming. Or is it? The show's producers will no doubt be counting on the British passion for all things Scandinavian, including Henriksson's Wallander.

Driven originally by the work of crime writers (Norway's Jo Nesbø , Sweden's Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell , the creator of Wallander), "Scandi-mania" now dominates swathes of the British TV schedule, with large and devoted audiences for The Killing , Borgen and The Bridge (as well as Kenneth Branagh's Wallander remake). Broadchurch , ITV's current eight-part thriller starring David Tennant, pays homage to the leisurely pace and gloomy atmosphere of Scandinavian noir: one murder (so far, anyway); one investigation, strung out across the whole series; one detective – Tennant – wearing the kind of dour, absent expression Henriksson patented as Wallander. Theatre , then, could be the next frontier. "Ten years ago, I wouldn't even have thought about bringing a Swedish monologue over here," says Martin Witts, the British producer responsible for bringing Doktor Glas to London. "But there are so many Wallander fans now: we think they're exactly the sort of people who'll come to the theatre, and won't be put off by the fact Krister is performing in Swedish. My aunt Christine is one of them." Witts laughs.

"I invited her to the opening night, and she said, 'I've got all his cuttings upstairs.' I think I've invited Krister's No 1 stalker." Henriksson has been surprised by this sea change in the British appetite for Scandinavian culture. "In England, they appreciated Wallander so much," he says. "That was a big shock for me. I hope I don't insult the British people, but I think this is something to do with the British mentality. They have opened themselves to other countries – to Scandinavia, for example. Great Britain is an island – a lovely island, but it has been a bit isolated. And suddenly something happens: they open up, they see what is around them." So what might British theatre-makers, and audiences, stand to learn from a Scandinavian invasion? Do they do things differently? Henriksson considers. "I think Sweden has been more open to influences around us," he says. "As a director, as an actor, you go a lot to London, Edinburgh, Paris, Berlin, seeing theatre … Whereas here – well, I met a British reviewer yesterday, and I asked him whether he went a lot to New York, or Berlin, seeing theatre.

And he said, 'Shit, no, why would I want to do that?' Then there is the fact that in Sweden, we have such high-quality theatre because the government gives a lot of money." In Britain, subsidy accounts for around a third of a theatre's income; in Scandinavian countries, the government can contribute closer to 75%. That's a big difference, I say. "I know," says Henriksson. "We complain, too, that we don't get enough. But in comparison to here, we get a lot. And that is very important. If you know that you don't have to earn money all the time, you can do more experimental things." The British director and playwright Mick Gordon has worked extensively in Sweden and Denmark, and has just been appointed artistic director of Denmark's Aarhus Teater. He describes Scandinavian theatre as a hybrid of European traditions. "Scandinavian theatre stands in the slipstream between German expressionism and the Russian Stanislavsky tradition," he says. "That results in very fine actors, who are able to be extremely naturalistic in television or film, but who are also able to feel very comfortable about expressionism.

And of course Bergman casts a long, crooked shadow." Gordon will be following the London transfer of Doktor Glas with interest. "It's not as if we haven't seen Scandinavian productions in Britain before," he says, "but this production is pioneering. We can't know whether one famous actor has the pulling power of a TV show like Borgen or The Killing – but the fact that they're willing to take the risk must say something about the UK's intrigue with Scandinavia. I'm planning to bring my Danish ensemble to London at some point." As for Henriksson, he's still coming to terms with the fact that he's about to step out on stage in a country whose own theatrical tradition he has long admired. "I've performed a lot of Pinter, a lot of Shakespeare," he says. "In Sweden, we just can't play Shakespeare. I was in a production of The Winter's Tale [directed by Ingmar Bergman]. It went around the world, and it was a beautiful production, but even then, when I was on stage, I thought, 'No – you can't say those lines in Swedish. I ought to be speaking in English.'" His dream is to take on a big Shakespearean role, in the original language.

"Maybe next," he says, "I'll go to the National [in London] and do King Lear ." He laughs. "That is my plan. But they haven't called yet." Krister Henriksson - IMDb IMDb Actor | Director Krister Henriksson was born on November 12, 1946 in Häverö, Stockholms län, Sweden as Jan Krister Allan Henriksson. He is an actor and director, known for Wallander (2005), Reconstruction (2003) and Faithless (2000). He has been married to Cecilia Nilsson since 1988. They have one child. See full bio » Born: The Two Faces Of Wallander | IndieWire The Two Faces Of Wallander The Two Faces Of Wallander Nov 6, 2012 1:00 am Share This Article Talk Guest column by Alice Maltin I’ve been lost in the world of Henning Mankell’s Wallander because I’m viewing the British adaptation on TV while simultaneously following the Swedish series on DVD. This is causing some confusion for me. Is that woman the killer or is it the handyman?

Was it the British or Swedish one where I saw that? It’s embarrassing, I admit. For the uninitiated, Kurt Wallander is a detective in a city outside of Stockholm and is played by Kenneth Branagh and Krister Henriksson . Both actors are wonderful in the role. Kurt is dedicated to police work and everything else in life is secondary, including personal relationships. He is the best at what he does, solving crimes. Wallander is sad and humorless; you might suspect that smiling is forbidden. Because the setting is a smaller city, you wouldn’t think terrible crimes occur, but you’d be wrong. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t smile. That, and the biting cold and rain that invariably accompanies his search for the bad guys in a clean but stark landscape. (I usually pride myself on knowing at the outset that the butler did it…but that’s not the case here.) Things are never quite what they seem. Police work can be slow and exhausting; you feel this watching Wallander. You see the wearisome frustration of dealing with witnesses who don’t want to talk and criminals posing as innocent victims. I find it all fascinating and the TV and DVR stay on. And, it’s never boring.

Both Branagh and Henriksson do nothing to make themselves look attractive…but they are. I know Branagh is a handsome man; here he looks older and tired. I believe you call that acting. Henriksson is not known in the U.S. but I bet he was one good-looking guy in his youth. (Tall, blond and blue eyed.) They are the opposite of their counterparts on American TV and so are their colleagues. If hair and make-up are used you wouldn’t know it. Their costume designer has them dressing plainly; not a trace of Ralph Lauren to be found anywhere. Both versions have their colleagues making mistakes, lots of them. They go into a suspect’s house without waiting for backup; they fail to pick up clues because they are thinking of other things like getting home to their families. Again, this would be unacceptable on American TV. No one goes in without backup: we know that because we’ve spent years watching CSI, NCIS, Rizzoli and Isles, The Closer, et al. In other words, these detectives are real, with all the frailties like the rest of us. Wallander is left picking up the pieces. I prefer the Swedish version to the British.

I thought I would have difficulty with subtitles but I don’t. In fact, listening to Swedish is fun. While picking up some phrases I found out that everyone in Sweden says “OK.” Who knew? Perhaps it’s a way of traveling to Scandinavia without leaving my armchair. Both versions are filmed in Sweden, however. I love watching Sir Kenneth, who does justice to Mankell’s Wallander…yet Heniksson has a certain something that makes you want to watch him. You can’t go wrong with either version. Branagh’s Wallander will be playing on Public Broadcasting stations throughout the year and is available on DVD . Krister Henriksson’s Wallander is available on download and DVD .

Question: Which TV detective is played by Krister Hendriksson?
Answer: 'WALLANDER'